Please help to stop these tours. I have offered to post the letter created by my colleauge, Tracy Mack:

September 1st, 2014 marked the 35th year of the Mimico Lunatic Asylum/Lakeshore psychiatric hospital, now Humber College, closing their doors. In 2008 or 2009, Toronto psychiatric survivors were outraged that Humber was leading ghost tours on Halloween through the tunnels of the historic asylum for a fundraiser for Sick Kids…they were able to stop this event from occurring. Last year, on Halloween they had ghost and tunnel tours. This year they have renamed the tour to the Lakeshore Campus Tunnel Tour. This has to stop. And the connection between Halloween and Lakeshore must be severed.

The tour was done at the end of September this year as well , and it was rife with ghost stories. Whether the campus is Haunted or not is another matter, but the facts presented in this article are skewed and at times even totally inaccurate.

I’d like to share with you a few quotes from an article online, it is written by someone who took the tour this past September:
“Before the tour began, Bang told the group to look out for an orb. Apparently, the orb people see in the tunnels is actually the nurse who hung herself after being caught for having an affair with a patient.”

This is made up folklore, made up stories. Absolutely.

“About halfway down the hallway, we stopped to look at the foundation of the walls. Built with different materials, Bang told the group that management at the psychiatric hospital had the patients build the tunnels themselves in order to keep them occupied and to keep their minds off being institutionalized.”

Right…TO KEEP THEIR MINDS OFF BEING INSTITUTIONALIZED!…this was unpaid patient labour and a form of ‘therapy’. It took patients 8 years of hard manual labour to build the buildings and the tunnels. After inmates built the buildings and tunnels, they also repaired the buildings, transported coal into the asylum, washed and mended their own clothing, worked on the farms, and gardened all in the name of work therapy, if it can seriously be so named, goes beyond the limits of justice and is instead an outright exploitation of patients’ labor. There are, less than a mile away, 1511 mostly unmarked graves, all inmates who died while institutionalized. Yet, this is not ghostly enough to speak about

“Upon seeing a series of indents above the walls, someone asked what they were. Bang explained that the indents were once windows. The hallways were only lit by candle at night and natural sunlight by day. In fact, the working patients often sat and ate their lunch while basking in the sunlight from above.”

I’m sorry, but I doubt there was much “basking in the sunlight”.

“Further down the hallway, we came across many rusted bolts in the wall. “Those bolts used to be for shackles,” said Bang. Patients were shackled to the wall when they were having an “episode” – as Bang put it. Basically, men and women sat with their hands banded together by shackles while they screamed in the glow of the candle-lit hallways.”

What is an “episode” ? And the institution was separated by gender: men and women would not have been “banded together by shackles while they screamed in the glow of the candle-lit hallways”. Conjecture and folklore, combined with bullshit.

“Next we saw a couple of caged cells in the walls. Bang said the rumour is that the jail cells were for naughty patients. Secured with thick beams from ceiling to floor, the jail cell is said to have held patrons that got into many physical fights.”

What is a ‘naughty’ patient? And this is rumour and conjecture.

” Despite not seeing any dead nurse orbs, I was intrigued by the stories of the people who lived and worked here. Imagining how they suffered, abandoned from society, most of them dying unnamed.”

Well, at least they do get one thing right

“If you are interested in taking the tour, Bang will be guiding groups down into the tunnels on Halloween night. You might be in for a treat! Bang said the tour groups that come at night frequently experience the so-called orbs. In other words, a dead nurse is waiting for you to walk her hallway.”

Folklore, made up ghost stories, and unfounded rumors which are then presented as historical facts.
The outrage that is being felt throughout the psychiatric community, again, is premised on the connection between Halloween and the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. That connection is wrong. It’s wrong on any day to perpetuate these ghost stories but on Halloween, the people who take the tours are looking to be scared and for ghost stories.

This year they have downplayed the theme of the tour… naming it as Lakeshore Campus Tunnel Tour, which is impeding our ability to have it cancelled. However, the name does not make a difference, whether it is framed publicly as a ghost tour (as it was last year) or as a tunnel tour… This Halloween ‘event’ is a sad reminder that, despite changes in public attitudes, stigma and discrimination are still alive and kicking, is based on the myth that people who are diagnosed with a psychiatric diagnosis are ‘scary’. We all enjoy a joke, but when they come at the expense of those within the psychiatric community, who struggle everyday with the sanism/stigma, discrimination, and oppression, it does real harm. Halloween attractions based around ‘mental patients’ or ‘asylums’, fuel the deep rooted misconceptions that still surround psychiatric diagnoses. “Imagine how you’d feel if you, or a member of your family, had just been in a psychiatric hospital and were enjoying a fun day out, only to be faced with this type of ‘entertainment’? ” Hundreds of people died in there, people were tortured with ECT, lobotomies, and shock therapy… 35 years ago… some people who were inmates there could still be alive and for others their children or other family members could be. These events, erase the history of the inmates, the history that fuels how this community still have their rights taken away by being forced to take mind altering drugs and involuntarily commitment. Ghost tours would never ever be done in a residential school, yet in terms of psychiatric patients, our histories of abuse and torture are not valuable or deserving of the respect that other marginalized communities do. The history needs to preserved and the untold stories embedded within those walls need to be respectfully heard, the real stories.

How do we respect and memorialize a past such as this? Algoma University is one example. Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario, the main building, was the Shingwauk Residential School that closed in 1970. The university runs an archive on residential schools, they have gathered the records of many people who were incarcerated there and in other residential schools. The university offers not only courses but a degree program in Anishinaabe studies. In every class, in every department, Native Studies are intertwined within the courses… as a former student of Algoma… I left not only with a degree in my respective area.. but a wealth of invaluable knowledge in regards to Aboriginal issues….this is how histories filled with abuse and torture should be memorialized…

What this highlights is that as Humber had to cancel this one year due to the outcry of the community… that the exploitation of that history for publicity and capitalist gains is more important than respecting people deemed as having a psychiatric diagnosis. We would like to encourage you to challenge this event, to challenge how it serves to reinforce negative views of those who experience psychiatric diagnosis while concurrently erasing the history of psychiatric inmates, by complaining directly to the Principal of Humber College, Wanda Buote, through e-mails, through phone calls and lastly, if we cannot have it halted… to join us at Humber College for a protest on Halloween night.

Wanda Buotewanda.buote@humber.ca

416.675.6622 x 3332

If you would like to be involved Halloween night, if we are unable to have this cancelled, please contact Tracy Mack at mstracymack@gmail.com

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About Me

ESTÉE KLAR

I’m a PhD candidate at York University, Critical Disability Studies, with a multi-disciplinary background in the arts as a curator and writer. I am the Founder of The Autism Acceptance Project (www.taaproject.com), and an enamoured mother of my only son who lives with the autism label. I like to write about our journey, critical issues regarding autism in the area of human rights, law, and social justice, as well as reflexive practices in (auto)ethnographic writing about autism.

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